The women from the fringes

In her first collection of stories, Birds of a Lesser Paradise (2012), Megan Mayhew Bergman focused on the relationships between humans and animals. In her new collection, Almost Famous Women, Bergman focuses on the lives of real women who have been marginalized (or mythologized) in history. They include Violet and Daisy Hilton, conjoined twins at odds in life but not in body; Marion “Joe” Carstairs, a womanizing power boat racer; Allegra Byron, the illegitimate daughter of Lord Byron and Claire Clairmont; and many other women whose stories are as captivating as they are obscure.

Book Clubs Column by Julie Hale

Set on a fictional Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota, Louise Erdrich’s chilling novel, The Round House, focuses on a Native American boy’s efforts to make sense of the world after a brutal crime. Joe is 13 when his mother, Geraldine, is raped near a sacred structure—the round house of the book’s title. The main suspect is white. When questions involving tribal courts...

Finding meaning in the mundane

Four years after the publication of his short story collection Mothers and Sons and on the heels of his novel Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín returns with The Empty Family, another group of stories that will only enhance his stature as an esteemed author of literary fiction.As was true in Mothers and Sons, this collection features a unifying theme—the often unsettling, sometimes...

A collection of horror stories from the King

In his latest collection of never-before-published stories, Stephen King proves once again that he has no equal at delivering chills. While one can debate whether at least two of these stories might qualify as novellas, all four are meaty tales of humans in extremis, narrated with the propulsive energy that’s the hallmark of King’s work.Tess, the protagonist of “Big...

Saving literature, and eventually himself

In the pantheon of modern fiction, how important is Raymond Carver? Fellow writer Robert Pope once dubbed him the “salvation of American literature.” Charles McGrath, former editor of the New Yorker and the New York Times Book Review, called him the “bellwether for a whole generation.” And now Carol Sklenicka has written a wonderful biography of Carver that, at nearly...

A master's new tales of suspense

Fans of Stephen King's short fiction should be grateful he was selected to edit the 2007 Best American Short Stories. That assignment rekindled his enthusiasm for the form, and the result is this richly varied collection of 13 tales that display his mastery of horror fiction.Published originally in magazines as disparate as The New Yorker and Playboy, the stories touch on all aspects of the...

History's horror

Shira Nayman's Awake in the Dark, a collection of three stories and a novella, is another work focusting tightly on a single theme: the Holocaust and the way in which the harrowing events of that time ripple through the lives of her characters, both past and present, to indelibly shape their identities. Nayman is adept at reversing the reader's expectations as her characters grapple...

Stories that conjure imagined worlds

In Music Through the Floor, Pushcart Prize winner Eric Puchner shows just how startling a first work can be. The nine stories included here wake you up to the joy and oftentimes heartache of a tale well told. In Children of God, the misfits in the story are not the two developmentally disabled adults but rather the parents and normal people surrounding them. Child's Play tells of little boys...

Fables for our times

A MacArthur Fellow, a recipient of both an NEA grant and a Guggenheim fellowship, and the author of more than 10 works of fiction and nonfiction, Charles Johnson is more than a little prolific. His novel, Middle Passage, won the 1990 National Book Award while his latest short story collection, Dr. King's Refrigerator and Other Bedtime Stories is sure to crack apart any notion that today's...

Reverence for a rugged land

I want to live in Wyoming. In Elk Tooth, to be exact, where I would drink shots with and compare beards to and maybe drag home the people Annie Proulx knows. Surely she knows them. There's no other explanation for the pulsing blood of life and death and hilarity that oozes from every living being (alligators and wolves and elks included) in her new short-story collection, Bad Dirt: Wyoming...